Gary Bauer, bottom-feeding in the polls for the GOP presidential nomination,
has attacked a Vermont state supreme court ruling that recognizes homosexual
marriages. Though no bombs exploded nor were bullets fired, he has labeled
this legal action to be 'terrorism' against traditional family values.

If Bauer is in the presidential race solely for publicity, he's succeeded.
But has his inflammatory rhetoric contributed to the advancement of the
social conservative cause? Late-night talk show comedians have already
spun his words into images of self-righteous religious right-wingers dispatching
the Sexual Gestapo to round up homosexual married couples. Bauer's statement
isn't resonating with the Great American Middle, whose votes are critical
for social conservative victory.

Speaking as a social conservative (and a Christian), I know when I'm
being pandered to. For the true social conservative response to homosexual
marriages lies not with extremist terminology -- but with libertarian
economics.

To understand that, we need only follow the money.

For the United States, it all started generations ago, when the government
exceeded its traditional roles of policeman and soldier and decided that
it would play nanny too, by offering to the citizenry such benefits as
a publicly-administered pension. One of Social Security's earliest rules
recognized that a person had a claim to benefits earned over a lifetime
by a spouse. The rule was made in recognition of the traditional family
structure, to provide pension payments in the situation of a widowed wife
who supported her husband throughout his working career yet hadn't directly
contributed into the Social Security system.

Eventually, the government came to require private companies to provide
pension and medical insurance benefits for their full-time employees.
Again, in the name of protecting the traditional family structure, pensions
were made transferrable to spouses, and spouses were automatically beneficiaries
of medical insurance packages at no extra cost to the employee.

The legislators who wrote and voted for these laws undoubtedly thought
in terms of traditional marriage, and even stereotypically pictured the
family with a working husband and dependent wife. Nonetheless, they created
a huge pool of government-mandated benefits accruing to anyone who could
get herself/himself identified as a 'spouse.'

And God knows, homosexuals today could certainly use that money.

Homosexuality is an extremely unhealthy practice. The average life expectancy
of a homosexual male is only forty-one years -- three and a half decades
less than that of heterosexual males. The AIDS epidemic, which infects
fifty percent of the homosexual population in the United States, and carries
an average treatment cost of thousands of dollars annually, has made matters
even more critical. Homosexuals desperately need huge infusions of medical
treatment -- and they want someone else to pay the bill.

Follow the money: (1) have homosexual marriages officially recognized
by government, (2) 'marry' sick homosexuals to healthy homosexuals with
better jobs and benefits, (3) extend those benefits to the sick. Then
all the legislation that was written to protect and strengthen traditional
marriages will cause money to flow toward homosexuals instead. It's the
Law of Unintended Consequences in full blossom.

It's not the sex, it's the money. Most homosexuals have multitudes of
sexual partners a year, and stable, monogamous relationships have always
been a rarity among homosexuals. If it wasn't for the money involved,
there might be little activism in favor of homosexual marriage even today.

So isn't the libertarian economics solution also the best social conservative
solution? That is: get the money out of the system!

If Social Security were privatized, workers would have individual pension
accounts with assets that could be legally transferred by private contract
rather than the stroke of a politician's pen. If federal requirements
for corporate employee benefits were eliminated, market forces would raise
salaries to compensate -- and employees could invest the money into pension
and medical plans of their own choice. Costs would be scaled to number
of recipients rather than sexual relationship.

Thus deprived of the economic incentive of billions of dollars in government-mandated
income transfer, the push for homosexual marriage would probably lose
much of its political steam.

The conflict over legally recognizing homosexual marriage is just one
more example of how Big Government inevitably erodes traditional values
-- a lesson social conservatives should have learned long ago from public
schools and welfare. Big Government transfers wealth from those who earned
it to those who did not; that's stealing, there's a commandment forbidding
it, and good Christians, if they are consistent, should condemn it as
contributing to society's moral decline.

Nonetheless, religious right candidates Gary Bauer and Pat Buchanan heartily
support protectionist policies and 'pro-worker' legislation that will
use government force to benefit blue collar workers at the expense of
the rest of us.

It will then be up to future legal semanticists to pervert those measures
as well.